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Ashley Doiron is 28, single, and having a hard time meeting other women in Vancouver.

Suppressing her aversion to the club scene, she went to Lick — the city’s only lesbian bar — before it closed last year and now attends some of the local nightclub-style events that cater to queer women, but it’s not the way she really wants to meet someone.

“If you’re not into the scene, it can be a very awkward place,” she says.

Doiron has also overcome her aversion to online dating, which she’s been doing for a few months, but gets the feeling that many of the women who make contact with her that way are socially awkward. She’s met a few “normal girls” online, but so far hasn’t hit it off with anyone.

In many ways, Doiron says, her experience shows how the queer dating scene mirrors the straight world: People are looking for alternatives to bars and clubs and increasingly turning online.

But there are important differences. The pool of potential partners, for both women and men, is a whole lot smaller and so is the pool of potential meeting places. With Pride weekend, the year’s most visible celebration of queer culture, upon us, it’s easy to forget that outside of a few select places in the West End and east Vancouver, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender relationships remain largely invisible.

For example, straight people can join a club, community group or sports team and the prevailing expectation is that everyone else is straight, explained Dara Parker, executive director at Qmunity, a queer resources centre in the West End. Despite the increasing mainstream acceptance of queer culture in recent years, especially in the urban centres, Parker says there is still no way she could go into a Granville Street nightclub — or anywhere that’s not a designated queer space — and approach another woman.

“It would make me far too vulnerable,” explains the petite brunette, who is conservatively dressed in a cardigan and pencil skirt, looking every bit the urban professional.

For this reason, Parker argues that despite society becoming more accepting of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, queer-dominated spaces are still needed. In Vancouver, they are no longer hideouts, but rather places where everyone is clear on the ground rules and people don’t have to explain themselves, she says.

“Vancouver is improving in its inclusiveness and its visible diversity, but it still feels unsafe for many people,” Parker says. “You can change from one neighbourhood to another and that can change your feeling of security as you walk along the street holding your same-sex partner’s hand. I think for that reason that queer spaces are still incredibly important in terms of meeting people and especially in terms of finding romantic partnerships.”

Parker met her current partner in one such space, a monthly nightclub-style event known as Flygirl aimed at queer women.

Flygirl Productions is one of several groups organizing such events. It started in 2001, when being queer was not nearly as socially acceptable and a lot of people were hiding out in dark corners of bars in shady neighbourhoods, explained organizer Mandy Randhawa.

“Lick was not in the best of areas. You went to the front door, it still smelled like pee.”

Flygirl was created so that women would have a place to go that was esthetically beautiful, she said. “It was about wanting to be seen and being proud of who you were.”

Most events take place at various nightclubs around Vancouver which are selected for “state of the art sound and lighting, polite and accessible staff but most importantly safety,” according to the Flygirl website.

Now, with Lick having closed and no lesbian equivalent of Davie Street, these pop-up events are to some extent stepping in to fill the void. Flygirl holds two regular events per month — one bigger and one more intimate — and is expanding into other cities, including Victoria and Whistler, Randhawa said.

But attendance at Flygirl events tends to drop when the sun comes out. This is when some of the clientele makes tracks for the sports fields, most often the softball pitch, Randhawa said.

It’s something Doiron is considering doing herself. She’s thinking about joining the Mabel League — a fastpitch league for lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual women, as well as transgender people — as a way of meeting other women that doesn’t involve bars or alcohol.

But for now, she’s sticking with the Internet because in the real world “it’s really hard to tell who’s straight and who’s gay. The online dating takes a bit of the guesswork out of it.”

Internet dating was and continues to be huge for the queer community, Parker said, because it’s so easy to stay relatively anonymous.

Jason Marchand, 30, met his first boyfriend online, but says it’s not his preferred way to meet potential partners.

“I think the best way to approach online dating, gay or straight, is go in with high standards and low expectations because. ... I’d say the majority of men online are looking for one thing,” said Marchand, a nursing student who also works at Vancouver General Hospital. “If you want to date, you need to make that clear from the beginning and you need to stick to it.”

And while gay men in Vancouver have more options in terms of bars and clubs than lesbian women, Marchand — who notes that he has met some great guys at bars — describes the scene as a crapshoot.

“You could meet a ... cokehead party-boy or you could meet your perfect match,” says Marchand, who is wearing a crisp blue-and-white striped dress shirt over dark jeans and chats easily with the staff at the restaurant where he used to work. The nightlife scene is limiting, he said, because it’s difficult to expand your social circle if you go to the same clubs on the same nights with the same people.

While Marchand says he doesn’t find it hard to get a date in Vancouver, getting a date with someone he’s interested in has proven difficult, which he says is probably also the case for straight people.

The biggest challenge in the gay community is that everybody knows everybody else’s business and it’s hard to find someone to date who isn’t a friend of a friend, Marchand says. This means that even on a date with someone you don’t know, they probably have some idea of who you are already.

“And if they don’t, you can be sure that they’re going to do some kind of background check on you and they’ll ask around. Depending on who they ask, that could work in your favour or that could work against you,” he says, adding that you better hope they don’t ask “some bitter queen whose ex you dated recently.

“It’s better to be kind of quiet and mysterious in Vancouver, I’ve discovered. You need to keep that sort of mystery about you.”

Marchand says he prefers to meet people through mutual friends, because the person is more likely to have similar values and beliefs as his own friends.

“Chances are you’re going to have something in common with these people.”

Carlos Lopez, a soft-spoken 31-year-old with a big smile, also prefers to meet people through networking, in his case online.

But he’s not sitting at home waiting for Lava Life messages. Lopez uses a smartphone app called Grindr, exclusively for gay men, that allows users to locate and send messages to other users in the area.

In an English Bay coffee shop, Lopez pulls out his smartphone and launches Grindr. A map of the area pops up and is covered instantly by hundreds of orange dots representing nearby users.

Lopez changes the display to show thumbnail profiles of the 100 closest Grindr users. There is no nudity in the profile pictures, but there are a lot of shirtless chests and one chunk of raw meat. Grindr is able to tell Lopez, for example, that 409 metres away there is a 28-year-old, 176 cm tall, 64 kg, white, single man who is looking for chatting, dating and friendships. Later in the afternoon, another Grindr user sends an instant message containing a suggestion that prompts Lopez to laugh nervously and quickly cover his phone. “Oh my God, you are not allowed to print that,” he says.

Lopez, who has a handful of similar apps on his phone, describes it as a truncated version of online dating. He says he has met a lot of friends that way, but no one serious. Like Marchand, he prefers to meet people through mutual friends and also through gay sports teams.

He, too, says that queer-dominated spaces are still necessary in the city, recalling going to a mainstream pub recently with some gay friends and feeling the need to constrain his behaviour.

“You can’t be as comfortable and you don’t know who’s around,” he says, adding that he doesn’t mind the influx of straight people into gay bars because he prefers that the communities be integrated rather than segregated.

But he looks forward to the day when they are no longer necessary because no one thinks twice about same-sex couples being openly affectionate — in any space, in any neighbourhood.

tcarman@vancouversun.com

twitter.com/tarajcarman

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